Li Jian: A true all-rounder

China.org.cn丨Updated: May 3, 2018

Before he became the deputy division chief of the Shahe Administration Office of the Construction Administration Bureau, a part of the central route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, 37-year-old Li Jian used to work in the General Office of the project's Hebei sub-bureau. Li's creed of work is to serve and to push forward. During his service at the General Office, Li took on responsibilities including reception, procurement, maintenance, and organizing activities for the labor union. The multi-year work experience helped him to become a real generalist.

As deputy division chief, Li quickly found himself facing new challenges -- to comprehensively regulate and standardize operations management. Along with his co-workers, Li completed the renovation of four sluice gate stations and the central control room, and his team came up with solutions to many obstacles, including securing the patent for the Anti-bird Net Automatic Control System.

The system was designed to tackle a specific problem -- birds. After the completion of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, ecological environment along the route had seen solid improvements. Unexpectedly however, flocks of little birds flew through holes of the sluice gate and built nests in gaps between electromechanical devices, causing enormous safety hazard on those precision instruments.

To solve this problem, working staff used to wield long bamboo poles to drive away those birds, but that wasn't enough. After repeatedly conducting research and doing experiments, Li's team designed a steel chain net with holes small enough to ward off the birds. The team also added an electronic control system that can raise or lower the net according to the elevation of water. The automated system protected the electromechanical devices in the lock chamber while causing no harm to the birds.

Li preferred to do a full research before taking actions. Whenever there was a new problem, Li would choose to solve it instead of giving up. A typical one was the automatic sweeping equipment for the drainage ditch, which could effectively clean the ditch at a controllable cost. If a problem was contingent, Li's strategy was to tackle it individually, if one kind of problems happened a lot, Li established certain rules and regulations to deal with them as a whole. With his efforts, more than 20 items of regulation were compiled or improved in three years. "Establishing rules are like building houses -- our supervisors have already selected the site and set up the framework for us. Next, it's our job to complete the decoration and develop specific design schemes reasonably," Li said.

Li could be tough sometimes. In the Party branch at the Shahe Administration Office, he served on the committee in charge of discipline inspection. He urged everyone to earnestly learn from violation cases of the Eight-Point Regulation of the CPC Central Committee, and he demanded all staff to strictly abide by the rules. In particular, Li resolutely forbids taking or soliciting bribes. He said enforcing a strict discipline inspection on the working staff was a job that must be done.

Nevertheless, Li is a considerate colleague and a warmhearted leader. He made efforts to learn about everyone's family and he really put his heart into it. When he learned that one young colleague was overwhelmed with burdens due to enormous medical costs, he immediately asked the labor union to offer substantial support to the colleague. He said, "We need to make sure that our staff can work without worries back in the family, only in that way can they focus on the work and naturally that will improve efficiency."